Migrants Resource Centre

Migrants Resource Centre has worked for over 30 years to help migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers overcome the barriers that prevent them from fully participating in British society. In this time, we have helped tens of thousands of people secure protection in the UK, regularise their immigration status, learn English, and find work. We have helped people who are stateless and have other nationality issues secure more certain future.

Grants

Migrants Resource Centre

Statelessness Training and Awareness Project

Grant: £40,000
November 13, 2017

The main aim of this project is to raise awareness, educate, and improve capacity relating to the UK’s statelessness determination procedure so that stateless persons in the UK have better opportunities to access appropriate assistance and advice and be granted leave to remain in the UK. Statelessness continues to be a relatively unknown problem, and stateless persons still face numerous barriers to accessing appropriate assistance and advice. In particular, because statelessness applications remain out of scope for legal aid, many stateless persons cannot find a competent legal advisor. Previous work (with LEF funding since 2015) has made significant progress, but there is still more to be done.

Going forward, the project will have five components:

a new online course for legal practitioners;

co-organisation of a conference on statelessness;

continuation of a combination of complementary in-person and webinar training for lawyers, support organisations, community organisations, and stateless persons;

expansion, updating, and promotion of the online educational tool for stateless persons (developed with 2015-17 funding); and

other awareness-raising and information-sharing, through media, blogs, the UK Statelessness Forum, and contributions to research.